Britannica
Sources used in this answer
How is the range of a data set calculated?
Created from Britannica articles
using AI.
AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.
statistics
Figure 1: A bar graph showing the marital status of 100 individuals.
In the context of statistics, the range is defined as the difference between the largest value and the smallest value in a data set.1
It serves as the simplest measure of variability for quantitative data, though it is limited because it is determined solely by the two extreme values rather than the entire data set.1